Naperville Search Engine Optimization Specialist

Have you ever wondered whether writing and maintaining your business blog is a waste of time?  If you have, it probably is.

Business blogs are valuable for some companies, but for many blogging takes up time and resources better spent elsewhere.

If any of the following statements apply to you, stop posting to your blog (or re-purpose what you would have posted) and start doing something more productive:

1. You dread writing another post. If you aren’t excited by the thought of sitting down to write your next post, you 1) have nothing to say and will once again borrow ideas from another blog, or 2) already realize blogging is a waste of time but won’t admit it.  Either way, whatever you publish will not represent your business well, so why do it?  Any time you feel you can’t put your best foot forward, don’t take the step.
2. Your page views are stagnant. When new posts average the same number of page views, and on a monthly basis so does your entire blog, you’ve stalled.  Maybe loyal readers keep returning, or maybe you gain some and lose some, but either way not much is happening.  A blog with a small stagnant readership is a blog that is a waste of time, at least for business purposes.  Unless of course you can accurately identify tangible benefits from that readership…
3. You can’t quantify your return… Many business owners say, “I don’t have any numbers to back it up, but I know my blog is paying off.”  Really?  How?  If your blog 1) isn’t sending significant traffic to your website via search engines, 2) isn’t directly generating sales, 3) doesn’t create a community, or 4) creates a community that doesn’t actually benefit your business, your blog isn’t paying off.  Blogging is like any other investment in time and resources:  If you don’t see a return, don’t do it.
4. … or worse, you don’t feel like trying to quantify your return. Never blog because you think it helps; you have toknow.  (Would you keep running an advertising campaign if you couldn’t tell whether it generated sales?)  Knowing takes effort.  If you’re not willing to put the time you need into tracking and analyzing data, you’re either 1) lazy or 2) afraid to find out you’re wasting your time on your blog.  Sometimes quitting is more admirable than staying the course.
5. Your goal is to provide valuable resources to customers.Great goal.  By all means do it. But don’t put how-to information, or useful tips, or non-news information on your blog.  Many people are blog-averse because most blogs are terrible, so your blog may automatically get painted with the same brush.  If your material is relatively evergreen create resource pages on your website instead.  (Potential customers who gladly read resource pages often run screaming from the same information when it appears on a blog.)  You’ll get a similar SEO boost and you won’t feel the need to inject “personality” into what you write.
6. Your readers are not your customers. This happens more often than you think.  For example, a friend is an incredibly successful financial planner.  He writes a blog that gets thousands of unique visitors a month.  But he writes about topics of interest only to other financial planners.  That would be fine if his blog generated media opportunities, or supported a book he plans to write, or helps him network and bring in more business — but it doesn’t. Building an audience is useful only if the audience contains current and potential customers.  Know who is reading your blog.  If you can’t be bothered to find out, that’s yet another indication it’s time to stop.

So you want to start blogging for clients? It can work. But if you’re expecting to get even a handful of clients in the first 6-months, I’d say you’re setting the bar of expectation pretty high. It could happen. But for most of you, it won’t.

But don’t be discouraged. Blogging for clients does work, but it will take time and an enormous amount of effort to build up the the kind of traffic required to generate enough traffic and qualified leads through your website, particularly in the pursuit of SEO, PPC, or web design clients.

So how long will the road become? It’s different for everyone of course. But my bet is that it will become a pretty damn long, dark, and lonely path. Especially while you’re just getting started and no one is paying any attention to your little blog.

You see, unlike other markets where publishers might know next to nothing about SEO, you’ll be publishing content alongside other SEOs and internet marketers. Many of whom have a few years head start on you. This makes generating traffic to your blog more difficult since you’ll be fighting for tid bits of long-tail traffic for quite some time. Fighting for the scraps is where we all must start I suppose.

Taking the Plunge

So you’ve decided fight the up-hill battle, take on the world, and dive into blogging for clients. If I haven’t scared you off yet, I commend you. You’re either utterly determined to make your business work or clinically insane. (Both can be advantages when starting your own client-based businesses.) And here’s a bit of advice if you do decide to go ahead with it.

In my opinion, one of the most important points to remember when blogging for clients is that it doesn’t necessarily pay to be the smartest guy in your given industry even if you are. Think about it. Who’s going to read advanced SEO content? Probably guys that already know a thing or two about search-engine optimization and aren’t likely to ever need your services. It might feel nice to get a comment or a retweet from an industry vet, but it probably won’t improve your bottom line. Nope. More often than not you’ll be much better off creating content that’s geared toward the novice.

But Brett (you might be thinking), don’t you have an SEO blog and sell services/products on it? I sure do partner. The key difference is that I try to offer services that align with the kind of products and services my audience might need. For example, I’m not selling SEO services. I’m providing white-label reseller SEO services to other SEOs that might need a helping hand outsourcing some of their work instead. Big difference.

Not Your Flavor of Soft Drink?

In short, if slogging it out in the blogosphere isn’t your cup of tea don’t worry. Blogging is just one way you can attract new clients to your business, certainly not the only way, and definitely not the fastest way to get a new client. But if you’re utterly determined to make this thing work, blogging can be a nice long-term play to attract more interest in your business.